[Mike]

Hi Folks
Please review the Bottlenose Dolphin from earlier missives. The
first to die were suspected of neuro-toxin poison. The gender was
initially idenifies as female and then it became an issue of some
secret, but not Navy Sonar.
Bridget

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12533135/
400 dead dolphins wash up on African beach
Animals might have been disoriented; U.S. Navy sonar a factor?
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 1:59 p.m. ET April 28, 2006

ZANZIBAR – Hundreds of dead dolphins washed up along the shore of a
popular tourist destination on Zanzibar’s northern coast, and
scientists on Friday ruled out poisoning.

“We started noticing them last night. All are adult dolphins. We
could do nothing but photograph them,” said a hotel owner who
preferred not to be named.

It was not immediately clear what killed the estimated 400 dolphins,
whose carcasses were strewn along a 2.5-mile stretch of Nungwi, said
Narriman Jidawi, a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine
Science in Zanzibar.

But the bottleneck dolphins, which live in deep offshore waters, had
empty stomachs, meaning that they could have been disoriented and
were swimming for some time to reorient themselves. They did not
starve to death and were not poisoned, Jidawi said.

In the United States, experts were investigating the possibility
that sonar from U.S. submarines could have been responsible for a
similar incident in Marathon, Fla., where 68 deep-water dolphins
stranded themselves in March 2005.

And U.S. scientists on Thursday said Navy sonar may have caused a
group of whales to strand themselves in Hawaii in 2004.
A U.S. Navy task force patrols the East Africa coast as part of
counterterrorism operations. A Navy official was not immediately
available for comment, but the service rarely comments on the
location of submarines at sea.

An official with the Zanzibar Fisheries Department said the islands
had never before witnessed the death of so many dolphins.
The deaths are a blow to the tourism industry in Zanzibar, where
thousands of visitors go to watch and swim with wild dolphins, said
Abdulsamad Melhi, owner of Sunset Bungalows, perched atop a small
cliff overlooking the beach.

Villagers, fishermen and hotel residents found the carcasses and
alerted officials. Mussa Aboud Jumbe, Zanzibar’s director of
fisheries, went on state radio to warn the public against eating the
dolphins’ meat, saying the cause of death had not been determined.
But residents who did eat the dolphins’ meat early Friday were all
doing fine, Jidawi said.

The Indo-Pacific bottlenose, humpback and spinner porpoises,
commonly known as dolphins, are the most common species in
Zanzibar’s coastal waters, with bottlenose and humpback dolphins
often found in mixed-species groups.